Two years from '16 Olympics, Rio is racing clock and age-old problems

This June 27 photo shows Olympic Park, which will host competitions during Rio's 2016 Olympics, under construction in an area previously occupied by the Jacarepagua Autodrome, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.LEO CORREA, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

RIO DE JANEIRO – A forest of balls – basketballs, volleyballs, soccer, field hockey and tennis balls – dangling from the ceiling looms above the entrance of the Rio 2016 organizing committee’s headquarters. It is a canopy whose symbolism is unmistakable even if unintentional.

With the 2016 Olympic Games opening exactly two years from Tuesday, Rio organizers find themselves juggling many things as they and the country race to finish preparations for the first Games held in South America while the rest of the world looks on skeptically.

Since Rio was awarded the Games in 2007, Ricardo Prado, the Rio 2016 sports advisory committee president, said, “It seems like everything that needed to be done in the last 30, 40 years (in Rio), (now the attitude is) ‘Well let's do everything in seven years, well let’s do everything in two years now.’”

In racing the clock, Rio 2016 organizers are also striving to ensure that the Games portray the richness, complexity and maturity of both Rio de Janeiro and Brazil instead of the one-dimensional global stereotypes of a sun-soaked, drunken, crime-infested beach resort in a futbol-obsessed nation and the stigmas that come with those caricatures.

“That we’re a Third World Country and Third World countries can’t deliver something this big,” said Prado, a 1984 Olympic silver medalist in the 400-meter individual medley for Brazil, who attended Mission Viejo High. “That we're not organized enough. That we don't have a enough money. That we don’t have the competence to do it. I think we represent a large part of the world on this task. We need to do it.

“It used to be enough (in Brazil) to be good in futbol. Now it's not good enough to just be good in futbol if your education system doesn't work, if your health system doesn't work. That’s what we woke up to.”

International Olympic Committee officials, however, are concerned that the wake-up call came too late for Rio.

“This is a worse situation than Athens,” John Coates, an IOC vice president from Australia, said during an April meeting in Portugal, comparing Rio to Greece's calamitous tardy run-up to 2004 Games.

While construction has begun on 71 percent of Olympic projects, up from 46 percent at the start of the year, according to a recent government report, many Olympic venues and key infrastructure projects are not scheduled to be completed until 2016, which makes IOC officials very nervous. Of particular concern is the May 2016 target for completion of a subway line tunneling through a mountain that would link Copacabana with the Olympic Park at Barra Da Tijuca.

“Time is an asset that you cannot replace when it is lost,” Aldo Rebelo, Brazil's minister of sport, recently conceded to reporters.

IOC officials aren’t the only ones anxious about the lack of completed venues.

“Even me as a leader of a group of athletes I feel the need to have venues to show them,” Prado said. “It's like (I should be able to say), ‘Guys, after our meeting, we’re going to have a venue tour.’ Two years we went to London with a year-and-a-half to go everything was up. And that’s how it should be.

“But we're trying to bury a bunch of stigmas in Rio in organizing these Games.”

One of those stigmas is that there's time and then there's Brazil time.

“This is something we would have liked to have buried, too, but this is one we couldn’t do it,” Prado said. “Here at the organizing committee we're an event organizer. We're not construction-site builders, so we depend on other branches of government to do it and we know they might not be as committed as we are at this moment.

“Maybe because of the World Cup, ‘Maybe let's get this done with, really worried about that. Then we'll worry about something else.’ Well we don't have that luxury. We have to worry about them now."

Brazil president Dilma Rousseff promised IOC president Thomas Bach in a July 11 meeting that “the Olympics will be my first priority” after the World Cup. But the Aquece Rio International Sailing Regatta on Rio's Guanabara Bay, the first test event of an Olympic venue, has once again raised concerns about Rio's commitment and ability to deliver the Games the organizers and government officials promised the IOC in 2009.

The week-long regatta, which opened Saturday, has been a public relations disaster for Rio officials. The event has also underscored Prado’s insistence that in order for the Rio Games to change how the world views the city and to a larger degree Brazil, Brazilians must alter their own mindsets.

“How do we change a mentality that’s been going on since ever where everybody that has a little creek behind their house uses that as a garbage can and that everything gets taken to the bay?” Prado asked last month during an interview in the café area of the Rio 2016 headquarters.

Indeed, the hundreds of streams, rivers and canals that flow down from mountains and hills behind Rio have turned Guanabara Bay into a dumping ground. More than 8 million people live in the 15 cities immediately above Guanabara Bay. Only 34 percent of Rio’s sewage is treated, leaving the rest to flow into waterways, according to Rio’s Department of the Environment.

Sofas and other furniture, dead cats and dead dogs, TVs and all sorts of garbage and sewage were spotted during this weekend’s racing. It has not been determined what exactly hit and damaged an Australian boat over the weekend.

“If the Olympics were tomorrow we would really have a problem,” Mathew Belcher, Australia's 2012 gold medalist in the 470 class, told reporters.

The Games that open in August 2016 are part of a transformation of Brazil – Rio in particular – that has been decades in the making. Rio won the Games, said Philip Wilkinson, Rio 2016’s international media manager, with “a message” that the Olympics would be a “catalyst for transformation.”

“It's boosting up investments that should have been done 30, 40 years ago, that took 30, 40 years to do,” Prado said. “It's like why did we wait so long? Does it take an Olympics to do that? So it's really a process of maturity that the country's going through with the World Cup and Olympics."

It is a process that Prado takes personally.

“We have a great responsibility,” he said. “As I've always felt like I’ve had. When I swam. When I went to school. And now we need to deliver the Olympic Games.

“We asked for it. And we need to do it well. And I try to be as precise and committed as I was when I was swimming. So it feels like I’m still an athlete with the responsibility, the chills, the excitement and I guess the possibility of change. I think Brazil has a great potential to be really a great country in education and health and I think this can help. So I feel like I may be able to help in something that can actually change.”

What historians and sociologists refer to as Rio’s “Lost Decades” began when the Brazilian government moved the nation’s capital to Brasilia from Rio in 1960. While Brazil's political center moved to Brasilia in the ensuing years, the nation’s economic power shifted from Rio to Sao Paulo.

“Rio fell off its bearings,” Wilkinson said.

And it got soft.

“I think Rio became just a beach resort thing, a balneario,” said Prado, using the Portuguese word for seaside resort. “Kind of like an Acapulco. And it really didn’t produce anything it seems like. And as soon as we got the Pan American Games (in Rio) it seemed like the world woke up to Rio and we started moving.”

The question is will Rio be able to move fast enough in the next two years to stage the Olympics it promised the world, Games that will reflect the city it believes it has become, with all its nuances, flaws, complexities and promise?

“I wish we had more venues to show (athletes),” Prado said with a shrug. “It seems late, yes, but two years is a long time, too. It will be done. Ever since I can recall being involved with Pan American Games, Olympics Games, there was always “Oh, it's not going to be ready, Oh, it's a major problem.’ Even L.A. (in 1984) it was. So I'm not going to say it will be easy. But we will deliver. We have to.”

This June 27 photo shows Olympic Park, which will host competitions during Rio's 2016 Olympics, under construction in an area previously occupied by the Jacarepagua Autodrome, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. LEO CORREA, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
International sailors competing in the first test event of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday are concerned about water pollution in Guanabara Bay that some have likened to a sewer. FELIPE DANA, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Trash floats on a polluted water channel that flows into Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro in this May 2014 file photo. FELIPE DANA, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ricardo Prado of Brazil, an Olympic silver medalist in swimming who attended Mission Viejo High, is the Rio sports advisory committee president. He knows the challenge of being ready for the 2016 Rio Games is great, but he believes Rio De Janeiro will be ready when the time comes. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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